Please take a second to answer the poll below and give us an idea of how confident you are in the team. You can view the interactive Fan Confidence Graph anytime via the nav bar above, or by clicking here. Thanks in advance for voting.

Given the team's current roster construction, farm system, management, etc., how confident are you in the Yankees' overall future?

6. After voting 8 for the entire season, my confidence really dropped drastically this week. It is almost certainly an overreaction, but this really feels like a slow meltdown. And you can never know what happens next (see Boston).

Anthony

I’ve been rating the same exact way. It may very well be an overreaction, especially to the injuries. Injuries or not though, there’s playoffs at stake and we just can’t get it done.

Big Members Only (formerly RI$P FTW)

LOL

Pasta Stumbling Sojo

This is the first time all season I’m down to a 7 from my normal 8. The reason is relatively simple: while I’m still confident in the team overall once the injured players are back, the chances of us having to play in the wild card game are large enough that there’s a much lower chance of us advancing in the playoffs.

I still think we’re likely to win the division, and if that becomes clearer and the injured players come back in normal form then I’ll be back to an 8.

BillB

Anyone who put a one is ridiculous. How can you have no confidence in a first place team? We have a 2 game lead plus help coming. Im at an 8

TomH

This is the rubric to the poll:

Given the team’s current roster construction, farm system, management, etc., how confident are you in the Yankees’ overall future?

This is your comment:

Anyone who put a one is ridiculous. How can you have no confidence in a first place team? We have a 2 game lead plus help coming. Im at an 8

Speaking for myself, a vote of 1 seems excessive. However, your objection to it depends on the 30 games left in the 2012 season, a pretty narrow criterion on which to base a vote (again, given the instruction).

Cross777

6 – and falling fast.

Help coming…Who? A-roid? 40 yr old Petite? Come on and take the Yankee colored glasses off. This collection of stars has no heart, drive, pride, any of the intangibles a team needs to win. (except the Captain Derek Jeter) Age has caught up to these guys and the youth is over rated.

RuralBob

Certainly one way to view things. My adage for many years has been “There’s a reason why they play the games.” And, just like I was not buying World Series garb when the Yanks had a 10-game lead, I am not quite ready to throw in the towel when the lead has dropped to 2 after a spate of injuries. It will be an interesting September.

EDDARD

We’re at 7 only because 3 of the injured starters should be coming back this week. If those players come back and we’re 2 games behind this time next week then my confidence will drop to a 1. I think the return of Alex and Teixera can lift the team and they can go on a win streak. These next two series are the biggest of the year and we have to go at least 4-3.

Here’s why we’re not at a 9 or 10-

“I thought that was Hughsie’s guy to get out, and he didn’t do it,” – Joe Girardi

TomH

I’ve been at 4 most of the year, owing to my interpretation of the poll’s rubric as implying concern ALSO with long-term prospects for the team. I received so many sneers about those concerns (my metaphor was something like “Return of 1965“) that I stopped bothering with justifications and just did hit-and-run voting.

Now I see that a 4 is not nearly the bottom of the barrel, although I suspect Return of 1965 is still not taken seriously, despite the references in a number of recent (past 48 hours) threads to the team’s age.

I stick with the 1965 metaphor. The team is now looking really old. 1965 came all at once, but this time it has been sneaking up all season. Maybe there is more redemptive talent in the pipeline now than there was then, but I’ll believe this when I see it, especially where pitching is concerned.

Include in the mix the Commissioner’s never-ending efforts to “level the playing field” as well as Yankee-announced budgetary restrictions that are coming into play soon (189 and all that) and the signs for the future are not good.

But what if it all turns around this month? Won’t I be embarrassed? Not at all. First, I’ll be glad that it turned around, but, second, my pessimism is structural–team age, budgets, MLB, minor league talent–and a September 2012 turnaround matters little in that context. It merely delays the inevitable.

Pasta Stumbling Sojo

I have no problem with different people having different scales (though I wish Mike would give clearer meaning to the poll numbers so that the average number would be more meaningful), and I understand your long term concerns, but what does a 4 mean for you concretely for the long term? How many playoff/WS appearances over the next 3/5/10 years?

TomH

I can’t answer your question. I have a sense of foreboding,that’s all, based on the failure to develop new, young and successful pitchers (especially). Much was expected, a few years ago, of Joba and Hughes. Not much payoff on those expectations.

No Trouts have come up to NY from within the system, no Strasberg’s, no hyper-talented stars. Who was the last? Cano? It’s still unclear whether Montero might have been such.

If I’m roughly correct to be pessimistic here, this seems a failure arising from different causes: in the organization (management, talent scouts, coaches), and as a result of (deliberate) changes made by MLB in the correlation of forces, whereby the power position that a team like the Yankees once enjoyed may be disappearing.

I wonder if anyone has ever been able to answer a question like the one you put. I vaguely recall a Reader’s Digest article (I think that was the mag.) from about 1964, by Bill Veeck, the madcap G.M. who flourished back then. The Yankees had lost a 7-game series to St. Louis, but no one among the Yankee faithful of the era seemed worried. Veeck noticed, though, that they had lost 3 WS’s in that 5-year stretch and smelled a decline coming. How I laughed, in my early 20’s Yankee fan’s arrogance, at such silliness in the dentist or doctor’s office where I read that piece.

Boom! Next year it came true, all at once! The decline of the 80s / early 90s had nothing like the shock effect on fans of the 1965 collapse. The effect of the former had been cushioned by the latter, something still within easy memory of many fans.

But, WOW!, the effect of the 1965 decline was tremendous, coming as it did after 45 years of spectacular success.

Well, maybe ARod will lead a counter-offensive. Maybe CC will pull it together.

But I’m telling ya, if they don’t get young-good soon, 1965 is just around the corner. Forward to the Past!

But no one in, say, 1981, could have offered anything but a wild guess about the future likelihood of playoff appearances, etc. To attempt exactitude of prediction where such a thing is not possible is not rational (it’s in Aristotle).

I agree that the instruction to the poll is conflating too many things, but it might be too cumbersome to change it.

DC

One point: you do realize Trout and Strasberg are/potentially are generational players. If they were easily found, every team would have Trouts and Strasbergs coming up through their systems. Unfair to criticize NY because they don’t at this time.

Jose M. Vazquez

One of the best commments I have ever read on this blog. Congratulations!

DC

Why? Because it provides a self-needed confirmation for your usual pessimistic outlook?

Kosmo

The 1960 Yanks were a much better team than the Pirates, they lost the WS because Stengel mismanaged his pitching staff not because they were in some noticable decline. The 1963 WS was lost because of Koufax and Drysdale. The 1964 team lost the WS because 1) Ford was injured 2) Berra like Stengel in 1960 mismanaged his pitching staff.

NY got burned because MLB instituted the draft.

Robinson Tilapia

There’s no amount of “But I remember 1965!” that can mask these comparisons being about as based on reality as any other naysayer argument, regardless of the age of the commenter.

I understand the parallel between aging superpowers with not a lot of immediate help coming through the system. It doesn’t take genius to recognize that.

How the rest of this story is told remains. While it’s not a completely different sport than it was in 1965 (where I was a nice, spry, -9 years old), it’s a different enough sport.

Robinson Tilapia

Also, nothing that happened in a world in which “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” still did not exist matters.

kenthadley

To be honest this is more like 1964 than 1965, from one who remembers both quite well.

steve s

You are quite right. I would have loved to see the 65 Yanks 2 games in front at the beginning of Sept. 1965.

kenthadley

I don’t think the 65 Yanks were two games in front even at the beginning of April of that year. They were pretty mediocre all year, but what we didn’t know was how much worse it was going to get. 66 and 67 were nightmares. Fortunately they were my teen years, so I was able to turn my attention to Betty Lou, Donna Marie, etc…..

Kosmo

The 1965 Yanks were 47-41 in June, July and August and were actually 2 games above .500 in late August but because of a slow start and a horrible September faded away.

Kosmo

provide NY makes it to the WS. The average age of the 1965 team was 28 years old, the 2012 team 33 years of age.

The 1965 team suffered more from irreplacable parts due to injury, Maris, Mantle, Bouton than old age( Elston Howard).

I too remember those seasons quite well.

Steven Smith

This is the most frustrating Yankee team I can recall in over 40 years of following the team. No doubt, expectations were high, still are.
All teams have injuries, but it seems, every corner is a new challenge with this bunch.
Right out of the gate Michale Pineda can’t go and it’s cut and paste with the starters.Rivera blows out his knee and the bullpen has been a question mark. Sabathia, Nova and Hughes have been all over the map in terms of performance. Pettitte was good while it lasted. Kuroda has been the most reliable starter and he’s been rewarded with the team scoring <2 runs in 10 of his starts.
Every statistic foretells disaster, none is more telling than 0'fer when trailing after 8 innings…Zero last at bat comeback wins!
Old, tired, hurt, uninspired- hardly the stuff of champions. There's still time and they are, after all, still in 1st place in the East (HOW), and possibly not for long. The schedule doesn't favor mediocrity. They will get everyone but Gardner (immeasurably missed) back before the end of the season and may rally to get it done, but it sure has been a roller-coaster ride!

steve s

Arod went 0 for 7 with 4 K’s against Single-A pitching and skipped yesterday’s game because it started at 11:00 a.m. Unless he was meeting Cousin Yuri yesterday morning he should have been playing. That has me brimming with confidence for his performance today. Congrats to all the Chicken Littles out there who, notwithstanding the constant slurs hurled their way by the Helen Keller commentators, saw this collapse coming as clearly as we all saw Reynolds 3 run homer coming. A well-deserved 1 (yes, we can chant now, “We’re No. 1!”)

kenthadley

personally, I think we’re playing more like number 2….

DC

I’ll never understand fans that derive a perverted joy from a team’s poor performance just because it seemingly justifies their season-long pessimistic attitude. Only in that fan’s world is a two game lead in September classified as a collapse.

Bavarian Yankee

everytime I watch the Yankees these days I’ve got that s-s-summertime, summertime sadness. Down to a 7 for the first time ever I think.

Nice Scheister

More one votes than tens. I voted one for the first time ever, mainly because of the management or lack thereof. Someone page Phil Jackson so he can help coach, inspire and get the most out of the players.

Pat D

Only if he’s switched to the Kevin Kline as Otto in A Fish Called Wanda form of Buddhism.

Andy Pettitte’s Fibula

The ship has sprung some leaks to say the least.

I don’t think they’re gonna be able to hold off Tampa and that 1 game wild card BS is really gonna suck if they get eliminated.

Pat D

5.

Pretty sure that’s the lowest I’ve ever voted.

Que sera sera.

http://stoogazzo@comcast.net Tom Morea

Excellent article, especially with regard to your appraisal of Girardi’s managing. The one question I have is, doesn’t he see what’s happening on the field, particularly regarding home-run Philip Hughes. After the first home run to Reynolds, Hughes gave up two singles, and ended the inning with runners on first and third. The very next inning he walks the first batter, followed by three singles, and Girardi still persisted to keep Hughes in for the three-run home run to Reynolds.What kind of fool manager is that?

Robinson Tilapia

A rounded-up 7, meaning more of a 6.5. Obviously, i’m not concerned about long-term because I have confidence in the organization to make shifts, even though we’ve talked ad nauseum on here as to where the limitations are.

As for between now and the end of the season? There’s what I want to happen, what I think will happen, and what I’m afraid will happen, and the distance between the second and third of those is a lot closer than the difference between the first and second. I think injuries and ineffectiveness have left the team with a lineup that I really have to question whether it can hold a small lead, in the stretch run, against the teams directly behind it. A big part of me simply thinks they can’t hold onto the lead with the personnel’s they’re sending out there. Alex returning doesn’t change much for me. I’d rather have Tex and Granderson back (and, hell, Mariano.) I’m going to root and hope for otherwise, obviously, but guys need to get healthy, and the guys in their place need to play the month of their life here.

I think I’m at peace with just about any result right now, but getting to what that result may be? That’s not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Wow

Down to a 5. Between the pitiful play they keep turning out, a weak to questionable farm system (including all the injuries and the normal uncertainty surrounding our lower level prospects), and the FO’s insistence on the $189 million budget, it’s hard to see a bright future.

Jimmy McNulty

Yeah, this is a pretty crappy team here. I actually think that the 2008 team was better than this current incarnation of it. Posada could actually hit in 2008, whereas Martin/Stewart can’t hit their way out of a ballsack. 2008 Giambi > 2012 Teixeira, Cano this year is clearly better than Cano in 2008. Jeter was probably a better defender in 2008 but a much better hitter this year, I’ll give the edge to 2012 Jeter. 2008 A-Rod to 2012 A-Rod? Oh my god, he was so much better in 2008 it wasn’t even funny. On to the outfield? Abreu and Damon were pretty good, better at the dish than Granderson and Swisher is this year. Melky blew, but keep in mind that Gardner’s out for the season too. The staff? I’d say 2008, if they were healthy. Wang, Moose, and Joba were awesome that year.